[CTC] Merkel visit and G-20

[Arthur Stamoulis]

A few articles below…

https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2017-03-17/trump-calling-me-an-isolationist-is-fake-news <https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2017-03-17/trump-calling-me-an-isolationist-is-fake-news>
Trump: Calling Me an Isolationist Is 'Fake News' 

The president on Friday defended his public stance on international trade during an appearance with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

By Andrew Soergel <https://www.usnews.com/topics/author/andrew-soergel>, Economy Reporter | March 17, 2017, at 4:10 p.m. 

President Donald Trump defended his views on trade and his "America first" policy during a tense news conference Friday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

When asked about a trade agenda that has been called "isolationist" for its focus on putting American jobs and American companies first, Trump said suggestions that he is an isolationist are nothing more than "fake news."

"I'm not an isolationist. I'm a free trader, but I'm also a fair trader. And our free trade has led to a lot of bad things happening," Trump said Friday from the East Room of the White House. "But I am not an isolationist by any stretch of the imagination. So I don't know what newspaper you're reading, but I guess that would be another example of, as you say, fake news."

It's not the first time <http://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/11/trump-they-think-im-an-isolationist-but-im-a-free-trader.html> Trump has defended himself as an advocate for free trade. But he made a habit of attacking trade deals – like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the North American Free Trade Agreement – while out on the campaign trail, and on Friday he again referred to NAFTA as a "disaster."

But the president said he's all for free trade if it's negotiated correctly and keeps American payrolls intact – a similar message to the ones he sent during public appearances with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during their recent trips to the White House.

But Trump did say the U.S. would have a different trade relationship with the rest of the world under his leadership – though he stopped short of sharing specifics.

"We're a very powerful company – country. We're a very strong, very strong country," Trump said. "We will have a different policy, but it's going to be a great policy for not only the United States but a great policy worldwide."

Merkel's visit to the U.S. was ironically timed, considering Trump Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin traveled to Germany this week for a gathering of the Group of 20 international finance ministers and officials. Mnuchin reiterated Trump's message during a news conference Thursday, saying the administration does not want "to get into trade wars" and that Trump "does believe in free trade, but he wants free and fair trade," according to Reuters <http://www.reuters.com/article/us-g20-trade-mnuchin-idUSKBN16N2KZ>.

But Trump on Friday suggested Germany – a country that enjoyed a trade surplus of more than $270 billion last year – was getting the better end of trade deals with other countries, saying "the negotiators for Germany have done a far better job than the negotiators for the United States."

Merkel, however, was quick to correct him, saying Germany's trade deals are orchestrated through the European Union and not directly with the U.S.
"When we speak about trade agreements, the European Union is negotiating those agreements for all of the member states of the European Union, but obviously there's also input by the member states," Merkel said following Trump's remarks. "Any kind of agreement that we have concluded … brought us more jobs, actually. … That's the purpose of concluding agreements, that both sides win."

Trump reiterated Merkel's sentiment that trade deals should result in mutual satisfaction, though he appeared to contradict prior claims that the U.S. doesn't "win anymore" in terms of trade.

"We don't want victory. We want fairness," Trump said. "It's probably the reason I'm here [in the White House] is when you talk about trade."

Trump and Merkel spoke with a group of business leaders earlier in the day, touching on, among other things, job training and apprenticeship programs.

But neither leader had been particularly supportive of the other in recent months, potentially setting the stage for an awkward series of dialogues. Merkel has criticized <http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/761614/Angela-Merkel-EU-Donald-Trump-travel-ban-Stefan-Lofven> Trump's efforts to ban travel from certain Muslim majority countries. And Trump has bashed Merkel's initial openness to accepting refugees into Germany. Trump trade czar Peter Navarro, meanwhile, suggested in a January interview with the Financial Times <https://www.ft.com/content/57f104d2-e742-11e6-893c-082c54a7f539> that Germany "continues to exploit other countries in the EU as well as the U.S." through a "grossly undervalued" euro.

But Merkel appeared to head off any potential awkwardness in her meeting with Trump during her opening remarks.

"I've always said it's much, much better to talk to one another and not about one another, and I think our conversation proved this," she said Friday.



https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/new-rifts-emerge-as-trump-rejects-free-trade-statement-at-g20-meeting/2017/03/18/aa69b1a2-0bf3-11e7-a15f-a58d4a988474_story.html?utm_term=.26f2caa9d890 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/new-rifts-emerge-as-trump-rejects-free-trade-statement-at-g20-meeting/2017/03/18/aa69b1a2-0bf3-11e7-a15f-a58d4a988474_story.html?utm_term=.26f2caa9d890>
New rifts emerge as Trump administration rejects free trade statement at G-20 meeting

 <>By Damian Paletta <https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/damian-paletta> March 18
BADEN-BADEN, Germany — The Trump administration on Saturday rejected a statement from other leading economies that warned against the perils of trade protectionism, the latest sign of how the administration’s more combative approach to diplomacy could create rifts with U.S. allies and leave traditional partners in the dark about the direction of U.S. policy.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, appearing at a gathering of economic ministers and central bankers from the 20 largest economies, rebuffed multiple entreaties from German officials to include in the meeting’s joint statement language emphasizing the importance of free trade and that it should be conducted in a “rules based” manner, following existing standards and agreements.

By rejecting language that would have said the United States is opposed to protectionism, the White House sent a clear signal that it would not accept existing trade norms and could pursue a more antagonistic approach with trading partners around the world. Such language has been considered ordinary and non-controversial in recent meetings of the Group of 20.

“I understand what the president’s desire is and his policies and I negotiated them from here, and we couldn’t be happier with the outcome,” Mnuchin said at a news conference Saturday.

Donald Trump made opposition to numerous trade deals a cornerstone of his presidential campaign and pulled the United States out of a broad Asia trade deal shortly after taking office, but has not yet followed up with other concrete steps to revamp the terms of America’s economic relationship with the world. He has threatened tariffs and other measures to correct what he says are other countries’ unfair advantages in their trade relationships with the United States, mostly taking aim at China and Mexico.

For many years, the United States has been the country rallying other nations to the cause of free trade and common language in the communiqués that follow meetings of economic ministers and central banks. Several European officials and one former U.S. official who had attended past G-20 meetings said it was the first time the United States had blocked such an effort.

The move follows new strains in the U.S. relationship with Britain and Germany, traditionally two of the country’s most steadfast allies.

The White House on Friday cited an uncorroborated Fox News report to accuse a British spy agency of surveilling Trump at the behest of the Obama administration — an accusation the agency said was baseless.

Then the president launched a pair of tweets Saturday morning accusing Germany of failing to fulfill its obligations after several negative headlines about his meeting Friday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Washington.

“Despite what you have heard from the FAKE NEWS, I had a GREAT meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel,” Trump said on Twitter. “Nevertheless, Germany owes vast sums of money to NATO & the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany!”

(Germany does not owe vast sums of money to NATO, the defense alliance. Member nations are expected to spend 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense spending, but Germany spends 1.2 percent. It’s unclear what Trump is referring to when he says the United States must be paid more for its defense of Germany, which hosts a major U.S. air base.)

German economic officials spoke Saturday in Baden-Baden at about the same time Trump sent the accusatory tweets.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said the United States was at an “impasse” with others about what they should say on trade protectionism, so they decided to say nothing. He also accused the Trump administration of not having a firm view on what it was seeking in a trade policy.

“Obviously he had no mandate to talk about any definitions or interpretations of what the U.S. administration means by ‘fair trade,’ and that is something we have to accept for the time being,” Schäuble said.

Schäuble said that the finance ministers struggled to reach a consensus on how to approach trade.

“We have agreed on some wording and language on trade policy, which may be helpful or not,” he said at a news conference.

He added that “sometimes at such meetings you cannot reach all the results that you may want to achieve because you cannot force partners to go along with wording they are not [okay] with.”

The Germans had tried to get Mnuchin on board. Sensing opposition to the initial language from the Trump administration, German officials had watered it down several times but Mnuchin resisted.

Finally, about 1 p.m. Saturday, Germany’s top central banker, Jens Weidmann, told his colleagues that the efforts to reach an agreement on the trade talks had failed.

Mnuchin then spoke up and asked whether they could agree on more generic language that said the countries wanted to “strengthen the contribution of trade.” Several other finance ministers balked, saying such language was meaningless.

Still, a version of Mnuchin’s proposal ended up in the final agreement, which contained just a brief generic reference: “We are working to strengthen the contribution of trade to our economies.”

The new language was markedly different from last year’s, when the finance ministers issued a joint statement that said, “We will resist all forms of protectionism.”

“We believe in free trade. We are one of the largest markets in the world. We are one of the largest trading partners in the world. Trade has been good for us and good for other people,” Mnuchin said at the news conference. “Having said that, we want to reexamine certain agreements. . . . To the extent that agreements are old agreements and need to be renegotiated, we will consider that as well.”

The G-20 first met during the George W. Bush administration, and its purpose is to try to get global agreement on issues that face each of the countries such as trade, taxes, financial regulation and national security.

Trump was elected in part because he vociferously rejected existing trade agreements, and the message Mnuchin delivered on behalf of the White House was that it planned to follow through on his campaign-trail promises.

Gary Schmitt, co-director of the Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said Trump could be sending a signal to other leaders that this is a negotiation, and the actions by Mnuchin at the meeting are an opening bid.

“You make people come to you by laying out a strident position,” Schmitt said, summing up the approach Trump has used for years in real estate and business. “But over the long term, it’s much harder to hold to that. These are people who lead countries and have other trade agreements. The U.S. is going to learn it’s not as in-the-driver-seat as they think.”

Joint statements issued after G-20 meetings are difficult to finalize and are only as meaningful as the countries want them to be. They aren’t formal treaties, but they do signal whether there is consensus. Many world leaders are trying to determine how Trump’s “America First” mantra will affect existing and future trade agreements, which dictate how goods and services are imported and exported around the world. The U.S. economy is the world’s largest, and changes in the way it buys and sells goods will have global ramifications.

The White House has said it thinks existing U.S. trade deals are unfair to American workers because the deals allow countries to lure away American jobs and send their goods to the United States at unfairly low prices. In addition to scrapping the Asian trade deal, Trump also has said he will renegotiate — or dump — the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Critics of this approach have said it could isolate the U.S. economy, make goods more expensive for Americans and hurt American companies that rely on exporting their goods around the world.

The angst about Trump’s approach quickly became the backdrop at the Baden-Baden meeting, and many foreign officials came seeking additional clarity from Mnuchin, whom most had never met. Mnuchin had spent his career in part at Goldman Sachs, starting a hedge fund and working as a Hollywood producer. They wanted to know whether he would veer from Trump on some of the economic nationalism they had heard coming from the White House.

He wouldn’t, they quickly learned.

During a closed-door meeting Friday with other finance ministers and central bankers, Mnuchin delivered the same message that Trump had made for months, just slightly softer, according to attendees who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal discussions: The United States would unapologetically work to redraft trade practices in a way that helps American workers. He said trade agreements need to be “free and fair” and balanced. He also said an overhaul of the U.S. tax code was overdue and that the United States would rethink regulations put in place after the Great Recession.

Mnuchin repeatedly asserted that what’s good for America’s economy is good for global growth.

“My primary focus is on economic growth in the United States,” Mnuchin said after meeting with Schäuble in Berlin. “I think that economic growth in the United States is good for us and good for the other major economies in the world.”

The message was not unexpected, but for many of the officials it was the first time they had heard it in person from a member of Trump’s Cabinet.

Mnuchin quickly became the “center of attention,” Canadian Finance Minister William Morneau said in an interview. Many sought one-on-one meetings with Mnuchin to explain their position and hear his views. The trade language in the joint statement served as a test to see how dug in Mnuchin — and ultimately Trump — was willing to be on trade.

Still, Mnuchin agreed to numerous meetings as he said he wanted to develop relationships with his foreign counterparts. He met with top officials from France, South Korea, Japan, China, Saudi Arabia, the European Central Bank, Britain, Germany and Argentina, among others. His first international trip was a blizzard of bilateral discussions, with everyone trying to size up the new treasury secretary.

Despite the reservations about a variety of Trump’s positions, numerous officials said they were impressed with Mnuchin’s presentation and command of issues. So far, he is one of the only members of Trump’s Cabinet who has sought to develop relationships with other foreign leaders. They still don’t know whether they will be able to influence his thinking, but they feel he has a willingness to listen, several G-20 attendees said.

“To a person, they have said they have been pleased with the way he is coming at issues,” Morneau said. “He is very constructive and talking about good relationships with all of his international counterparts.”

Two European officials described Mnuchin as friendly but “tough.” They also said the U.S. delegation at the G-20 was routinely checking back with its counterparts in Washington on certain issues, leading some Europeans to wonder with whom they were negotiating, Mnuchin or Trump. But one of the European officials said this was not uncommon for a new administration, which was still formalizing its viewpoint on an array of complicated matters.

The G-20 finance ministers’ meeting is the precursor to a gathering of the G-20 heads of state this summer in Hamburg. Many expect that the discussions on trade will only intensify by then, but now they know where the United States stands.


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/18/business/group-of-20-summit-us-trade.html <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/18/business/group-of-20-summit-us-trade.html>
U.S. Breaks With Allies Over Trade Issues Amid Trump’s ‘America First’ Vows

By JACK EWING <https://www.nytimes.com/by/jack-ewing>
MARCH 18, 2017 

BADEN-BADEN, Germany — The United States broke with other large industrial nations over trade on Saturday as the Trump administration rejected concerns among allies about spreading protectionism <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/p/protectionism_trade/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> and made clear that it would seek new approaches to managing global commerce.

At a meeting of finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/g/group_of_20/index.html?inline=nyt-org> industrialized and emerging nations and the European Union <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/e/european_union/index.html?inline=nyt-org>, Steven Mnuchin, attending his first major international gathering as Treasury secretary, signaled that American policy would follow the campaign promises made by President Trump to put “America first” and review existing trade agreements to seek better deals for the United States.

As a result, the ministers’ joint statement, normally a study in blandness, became an unlikely focus of controversy here. The representatives could agree only on a tortured compromise stating, in effect, that trade is a good thing. Adjectives like “open” were dropped, and the ministers omitted language used in previous communiqués that condemned protectionism, repudiating decades of free trade doctrine.

For Asian and European officials, many of them meeting their Trump administration counterparts for the first time, it was a startling lesson in how Mr. Trump and his team are overturning long-held assumptions about international commerce.

Mr. Mnuchin led off the ministers’ meeting on Friday with a declaration that current trade rules were unfair to the United States, positioning the administration against virtually all the other participants, according to an official who attended the closed session and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks.

“We thought that it was very important for the communiqué to reflect what we discussed here,” Mr. Mnuchin said at a news conference on Saturday. “The historical language was not relevant.”

At the insistence of the United States, the communiqué also dropped a pledge to observe the Paris accords on climate change. Mr. Mnuchin deflected questions on the issue, saying it was outside his purview.

The American government’s lack of reverence for existing norms and treaties is particularly unsettling to the change-averse Europeans, who are coping with weak economic growth and a surge in populism. The last thing they need is a disruption in commerce with their biggest trading partner.

Some complained privately that the American delegation rode into this stately spa and casino town, where Romans once bathed in the mineral-rich waters, determined to shake up the existing order but without any clear idea of what should replace it.

The disagreement over trade principles was a sharp contrast to the statement issued when the central bankers and finance ministers met in Chengdu, China, last July. “We underscore the role of open trade policies,” the leaders said in the Chengdu communiqué, which used the word “trade” six times. They promised to “resist all forms of protectionism.”

Less than a year ago, such a statement was not questioned. Business leaders on both sides of the Atlantic still hoped for a trade pact between the United States and the European Union that would eliminate already low tariffs and harmonize regulations governing things like vehicle headlights.

Since then, Mr. Trump has pulled out of the Trans- <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/23/us/politics/tpp-trump-trade-nafta.html>Pacific Partnership <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/23/us/politics/tpp-trump-trade-nafta.html> negotiated by President Barack Obama <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per>, vowed to renegotiate <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/business/economy/trump-trade-policy.html>the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada, and criticized the German carmaker BMW <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/business/trump-germany-bmw-mercedes.html> for building a factory in Mexico.

The best that the Group of 20 participants could come up with on Saturday was this: “We are working to strengthen the contribution of trade to our economies.”

Mr. Mnuchin argued that the news media’s focus on the language of the communiqué was overblown and said that the discussions in Baden Baden had been congenial. “We were incredibly productive,” he said.

But he also made it clear that the Trump administration had a vastly different view than its recent predecessors. “We believe in free trade,” he said. But he added, “We want to re-examine certain agreements.”
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